course, at least by neighbourhood and hearsay,-are inimical to poetry which best deserves the name; and we might not have possessed what we do, but for those long vacations spent at Stoke, in the society of his mother and aunt, where the tenderest feelings of his heart were still called forth.

The mention of Stoke and of his mother forces us to a digression. There is no indication of Gray having ever cared for any other woman but his mother. She engrossed all the regard he had to bestow on the sex, and as, whenever he felt at all he felt deeply, this affection was a part of his being. He owed, indeed, everything to her, for his father is described as a sort of monster, whose long indulgence in the violent passions of his temper seems at last to have perverted the natural feelings of his heart, and ended in that malignity of disposition that made the parent and husband the enemy of his own family.' His wife was obliged to seek the protection of the law against him; he threatened to pursue her with vengeance, and to ruin himself in order to undo her and her son-their only living child. She bore all, however, and would not abandon the shop and trade she had undertaken on her own account; and at her expense alone was her son maintained at Eton, where her brother, Mr. Antrobus, was assistant-master, and afterwards at the University. Such a mother deserved all the love a son was capable of; and he was indeed her pride and her comfort while she lived, spending some months of each year with her, and after her death clinging to her memory with his fullest tenacity of affection. He seldom mentioned her name without a sigh. He treasured her few remains, gowns and wearing apparel, in his college-rooms, having never the courage to open her boxes, in order to distribute them to her female friends. He writes years after, with a sort of bitterness, to his intimate friend Mr. Nicholls, as if, while it was in his power to prove his love, he had not done all that he ought:

'It is long since that I heard you were gone in haste into Yorkshire, on account of your mother's illness; and the same letter informed me that she was recovered, otherwise I had then wrote to you, only to beg you would take care of her, and to inform you that I had discovered a thing very little known, which is, that in one's whole life one can never have any more than a single mother. You may think this is obvious, and (what you call) a trite observation. You are a green gosling! I was at the same age (very near) as wise as you, and yet I never discovered this (with full evidence and conviction, I mean) till it was too late. It is thirteen years ago, and seems but as yesterday, and every day I live it sinks deeper in my heart.'-Mason, vol. ii. p. 307.

It is a comfort to think that such a mother's last years were happy. After her husband's death she retired with her sister, they having accumulated sufficient for their modest wishes, to

the house of a third widowed sister, at Stoke, near Windsor, the churchyard of which is immortalized as the scene of the Elegy. The only evidence we can find anywhere that the son resented his father's evil doings, is in the simple epitaph he wrote on his mother, where her husband's name is not even mentioned. It is a successful example of one of the most difficult of all forms of composition. After recording the death of Mary Antrobus, her sister, resting in hope of a joyful resurrection,' it follows:

In the same pious confidence,
Beside her friend and sister,
Here sleep the remains of
DOROTHY GRAY,

Widow, the careful, tender mother
Of many children, one of whom alone
Had the misfortune to survive her.'

She, and, in a lesser degree, her sister, his aunt, a person he loved very much, and had been used to from his infancy,' swallowed up and engrossed all the attention he had to bestow on the gentler sex. His Long Story' does, to be sure, record an incident where two fine ladies sought him out, and he endeavoured to return the civility by some well-turned compliments; but such company gave him, generally, very little satisfaction; for example, we find such splenetic notices as these:

For me, I am come to my resting-place, (Cambridge,) and find it very necessary, after living a month in a house with three women that laughed from morning to night, and would allow nothing to the sulkiness of my disposition. Company and cards at home, parties by land and water abroad, and (what they call) doing something, that is, racketing about from morning to night, are occupations, I find, that wear out my spirits, espe cially in a situation where one might sit still and be alone with pleasure; for the place was a hill like Clifden, opening to a very extensive and diversified landscape, with the Thames which is navigable running at its foot.'-Mason, vol. ii. p. 166.

Or this description of a fine lady:—

'I saw the lady you inquire after, when I was last in London, and a prodigious fine one she is. She had a strong suspicion of rouge on her cheeks, a cage of foreign birds and a piping bulfinch at her elbow, two little dogs on a cushion in her lap, and a cockatoo on her shoulder. They were all exceedingly glad to see me, and I them.'-Mason, vol. ii. p. 217.

In short, the only woman whom we find in any interesting relation to himself, besides his mother, is a certain Mrs. Bonfoy, of whose last illness there is a tender casual mention:-' Mrs. Bonfoy, who taught me to pray.' One chief privation of a college life he was, then, in no condition to feel. The absence of fine ladies might, indeed, almost atone for the presence of

boorish men, whose company he found means to avoid with very little trouble.

His acquaintance with Mason began in 1747. It arose on some early verses being shown to him, which he took the amiable trouble to revise, and afterwards he grew so much interested in their author, as to recommend him to the Fellows of Pembroke for a vacant Fellowship, at a time when this body were in a dispute with their Master about the right of nomination. This first piece of good fortune to Mason was the commencement of many others, and we trace him in this correspondence through a course of good things.

Gray's first notices of his new acquaintance are in letters to Dr. Wharton, which it needed some magnanimity in Mason to publish. The contrast of character, and Gray's conscious superiority, may be one main secret of their subsequent intimacy :

Mr. Mason is my acquaintance. I liked that ode much, but have found none else that did. He has much fancy, little judgment, and a good deal of modesty. I take him for a good and well-meaning creature; but then he is really in simplicity a child, and loves everybody he meets with. He reads little or nothing, writes abundance, and that with a design to make a fortune by it.'-Ibid. p. 48.

Again :

The author of it (Mason) grows apace into my good graces, as I know him more. He is very ingenious, with great good-nature and simplicity; a little vain, but in so harmless and comical a way, that it does not offend one at all; a little ambitious, but withal so ignorant in the world and its ways, that this does not hurt him in one's opinion; so sincere and so undisguised, that no mind with a spark of generosity would ever think of hurting him, he lies so open to injury; but so indolent, that, if he cannot overcome this habit, all his good qualities will signify nothing at all. After all, I like him so well, I could wish you knew him.'-Ibid. p. 69.

The substance of many of the letters in this new volume is criticism; very excellent, frequently, on Gray's part, and valuable as containing general maxims, though, as it is in most cases lavished on Mason's poetry, and mixed with much partial though genuine praise, the reader has to exercise some discrimination. The notices, too, of Gray's own poetry are interesting, of which some specimens shall be given. But, besides the subject of poetry, we have all the topics of the day touched upon in a lively manner; for, like many a shy, reserved person, Gray had a certain love of gossip, and he cared to know about people for whose society he had a contempt; in fact, news interested him, whenever it was of a nature to exercise his powers, satirical or moral. And we find many a sly hit at the self-seeking, the neglect of duty, the manners, the lives, the deaths of Cambridge dignitaries.

Your friend, Dr. Plumtre, (he writes) has lately sat for his picture to Wison. The motto, in large letters, (the measure of which he himself prescribed,) is, "Non magna loquimur, sed vivimus;" i. e. "We don't say much, but we hold good livings."'-Mitford, p. 195.

Here isa painful notice of the death of the Professor of Moral Theology, a Fellow and Vice-Master of Trinity, who got his nickname from having once served a curacy in the Fens:

'Cambridge itself is fruitful enough of events to furnish out many paragraphs in my Gazette. The most important is, that Frog Walker is dead. His last words were, (as the nurses sat by him, and said, "Ah! poor gentleman, he is going!") "Going, going! where am I going? I'm sure I know no more than the man in the moon." —Ibid. p. 320.

One of Gray's antipathies, was a certain Dr. Chapman, whom he called the conceited and overbearing Master of Magdalen College;' we find at one time the following description of him, as the triumphant orator on occasion of the Duke of Newcastle's (another of Gray's aversions) installation :—

Thus much I may venture to tell you, because it is probable nobody else has done it, that our friend -'s (Mason implies the name elsewhere) zeal and eloquence surpassed all powers of description. Vesuvius in an eruption is not more violent than his utterance, nor (since I am at my mountains) Pelion, with all its pine-trees in a storm of wind, more impetuous than his action; and yet the senate-house still stands, and we are all safe and well at your service. I was ready to sink for him, and scarce dared to look about me, when I was sure it was all over; but soon found I might have spared my confusion; all people joined to applaud him. Everything was quite right, and I dare swear, not three people here but think him a model of oratory: for all the Duke's little court came with a resolution to be pleased, and when the tone was once given, the University, who ever wait for the judgment of their betters, struck into it with an admirable harmony. For the rest of the performances, they were just what they usually are. Every one, while it lasted, was very gay and very busy in the morning, and very owlish and very tipsy at night: I make no exceptions, from the Chancellor to Blue Coat.'-Mason, vol. ii. p. 69.

And next, a history of the poor man's end. We give it in no commendation of the spirit in which it is written; but Gray's charity was not diffusive:

Cambridge is a delight of a place, now there is nobody in it. I do believe you would like it, if you knew what it was without inhabitants. It is they, I assure you, that get it an ill name, and spoil it. Our friend, Dr. Chapman (one of its nuisances) is not expected here again in a hurry. He is gone to his grave, with five fine mackerel (large and full of roe) in his belly he ate them all at one dinner. But his fate was a turbot on Trinity Sunday, of which he left little for the company besides the bones. He had not been hearty all the week; but, after this sixth fish, he never held up his head more, and a violent looseness carried him off. They say he made a very good end.'-Ibid. vol. ii. p. 167.

:

Here, too, is a highly characteristic notice of a case of pro

posed malversation of charitable funds, for which that age is so notorious:

In my way, I saw Winchester Cathedral again with pleasure, and supped with Dr. Balguy, who, I perceive, means to govern the Chapter. They give 2001. a-year to the poor of the city. His present scheme is to take away this, for it is only an encouragement to laziness. But what do they mean to do with it? That, indeed, I omitted to inquire, because I thought I knew.'-Mitford, p. 329.

This Dr. Balguy appears earlier in this volume in a more agreeable light; first, as having actually refused a bishopric on the ground that it had cost him one sleepless night, and he was determined it should not cost him another; and, again, where Gray says of him, soon after his appointment at Winchester, "I do really think him very much improved since he had his ' residence there; freer and more open, and his heart less set upon the mammon of unrighteousness.'

6

This, then, being the phase of clerical character of which Gray saw most, it became, or at least he chose it for his type of whatever was selfish, or sluggish, or retrograde. When he is dissatisfied with himself, or his progress, it is the spirit of the place creeping upon him. It must be granted that the following was only too common a picture of college life:

The spirit of laziness (the spirit of the place) begins to possess even me, who have so long declaimed against it; yet has it not so prevailed but that I feel that discontent with myself, that ennui, that ever accompanies it in its beginnings. Time will settle my conscience; time will reconcile me to this languid companion. We shall smoke, we shall tipple, we shall doze together we shall have our little jokes like other people, and our old stories: brandy will finish what port began: and, a month after the time, you will see in some corner of a London Evening Post, "Yesterday died the Reverend Mr. John Gray, Senior Fellow of Clare-Hall, a facetious companion, and well respected by all that knew him. His death is supposed to have been occasioned by a fit of an apoplexy, &c." -Mason, vol. ii. p. 65.

Therefore, when Mason chose the clerical profession, Gray, as it were, acquiesced in a great deal, as the necessary consequence of it. And certainly he did not expect, nor did Mason give any ground for the expectation, that he should henceforth make his sacred calling the great self-denying object of his thoughts, and the work of his life. Indeed, his talk about preferment is in the highest degree unsatisfactory, though, when he got it, he made a very respectable use of it. Writing about his expectations from great people, of the chance of a living in Derbyshire or of being sent to Ireland-while he professes, in a lofty way, his indifference to which scene they thrust him,' he adds: Yet, though I say I am indifferent to both these, I will, in my pre'sent circumstances, embrace either. The world has nothing to give me that I really care for; therefore, whatever she